Yesterday was World Water Day and i would like to speak a little on the subject of water. I undertook a research with a team on cocoa production in Ghana about five months ago. Our tours took us through about 80 cocoa villages in three regions;Ashanti,Brong Ahafo and Central regions.

To put in bluntly,every river,every single river or stream we saw was polluted! I am not exaggerating at all. I saw no rivers that looked like real rivers. They all looked like some milky,uninviting yellowish moving fluids.

It was therefore no surprise hearing a top official of the Ghana Water Company on Citi FM yesterday painting a picture of gloom and doom in potable water production in this country.

Every water body they process water on for us to drink is falling,in fact plummeting in quality,hence the need to use more chemicals to get even lesser amounts of water flowing through our taps. (that’s if we have them at all).

In the course of our interview with the cocoa farmers,(and we interviewed close to two thousand farmers)we noticed that at least 3/4 of them either directly engage in galamsey or a family member does! And we sit down in this country and wonder why our cocoa production is continually shrinking. The farmers are being lured to sell their lands or abandon farming entirely to pursue galamsey themselves,or sell off their lands for some quick cash.

In fact,in a village called Manso Nkran in the Ashanti Region, about 2/3 of the people that used to be cocoa farmers had stopped! A mining firm had bought all their cocoa lands and had built some living quarters somewhere for them.

Right before my eyes,i saw elders of a certain village talk among themselves and accuse the chief of not giving them part of the money he(the chief) collected from the chinese people. And how they were also going to sell the remaining land to another chinese group. That brings me to the influx of these chinese people in the galamsey business.

We entered a certain village and for a second,i thought we were in China! They were everywhere! I remember watching a news item some time back where Chinese miners were holding guns and terrorising Ghanaians off their lands! How? Can a Ghanaian go to China and threaten a Chinese person? Maybe only in a movie. They would kill you without blinking.

You should see the freedom and power they wield in the hinterlands of this country. Their long rows of huge four wheel drives that are parked close to galamsey sites and the chinese ‘half cast’ children roaming all over there is a sight to behold. Of course they are helped by Ghanaians in high offices in this country.

Who gives them the authority to go and savagely destroy our forests,farms and rivers? I’m sure if interrogated,they would produce documentation. Where did they get the documents from? From the sky?

Recently on Citi FM again, inhabitants of a villlage got up and burnt down one of the escavators of these chinese people because they saw that their only water source was being polluted. And guess what happened. The police went to the village,and arrested the villagers! Wonderful,right? Who then would protect our water bodies and trees? Yeah,our trees too. We saw people lumbering wood deep in the night to avoid detection.

We are in trouble people! And i can’t explain how helpless i felt after the trip. Our politicians travel all over the country. Can’t they see that our water bodies are all getting destroyed? You wont pass by a river in this day and see children swimming in a river.

Who would swim in poison? Do the rivers even have fishes in them anymore? Obviously not. The chemicals used in this galamsey have killed and are killing all the water bodies we have. People just divert water courses to mine with impunity!

The government must wake up! This problem is beyond press conferences and demonstrations. Chiefs must be spoken told to stop their greed. Farmers must know that the gold they’re soo much after can vanish one day. And what would they do after? Government must start arresting people and education right away.

The laws are there but they’re stuck in ink and paper. I give you three years. If nothing drastic is done about this,we would be importing water. And the chinese people that you see destroying Ghana,would be the same people ready to export water to us.